It's nice to have this space to retreat to. Even if it doesn't outcompete the corporate web anytime soon, the existence of another option will constrain how bad they can get a bit, and will create a place for refugees to go after each new outrage. And it's not like the core functionality of any of the corporate sites was that complicated underneath all the bloat, after people have been on here working out the kinks for a while there's no reason it should be any less convenient of an experience.

agreed, i can’t remember the last time reddit added an actual useful feature.

The only thing they did do relatively recently that I liked was adding the option for subs to not archive posts that are older than 6 months. But I guess when you think about it, that's more of just taking a restriction away, and less of adding something new. Other than that, though, it's either just useless stuff or stuff that actively made things worse.

To be fair about the archiving thing you have to consider that being able to make old data read only allows you to optimize a lot of things. With good engineering the allowance for archival should make the whole site faster and more stable. So sort of a soft feature.